Lynn Hart talks will be flying to Washington D.C. to be a part of the 50th anniversary commemoration of MLK's "I have a dream" speech. / Jay Pickthorn / Argus Leader

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President John F. Kennedy meets in the White House with leaders of the civil rights March on Washington, from left, Whitney Young, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Joachim Prinz, A. Philip Randolph, President Kennedy, Walter Reuther and Roy Wilkins. Behind Reuther is Vice President Lyndon Johnson. / Getty Images

Martin Luther King Jr. / Getty Images

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If you could go back in time to be an eyewitness to history — not to change it — wouldn’t you want to be there when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech?

To have been part of the crowd when he set his prepared text aside and took his listeners verbally to a land where “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’ ”

I would. So would Flandreau’s Lynn Hart, who was just a toddler when King led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, then delivered what now is known as the “I Have a Dream” speech Aug. 28, 1963.

At least Hart will be able to relive that moment. He is in Washington, D.C., an invited guest of The King Center, and today will carry the Yankton Sioux Tribe’s flag in the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.

On Wednesday, he will listen to President Obama speak on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the place from where King addressed a crowd of thousands.

Hart received the invitation because of his efforts to establish King’s birthday as an official holiday in South Dakota. In 1992, the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission presented him with a “Making of the King Holiday Award.”

Hart learned about the “I Have a Dream” speech in the Watertown home of his adoptive parents.

“They were both college teachers, and I got my college education at the dinner table,” Hart says.

He worked with the late Gov. George Mickelson, who proclaimed 1990 as the Year of Unity for white and Native American residents, in establishing Martin Luther King Day.

Twenty-three years later, Hart still encounters people who see no need for the holiday.

“People say, why celebrate the Martin Luther King holiday, we’re not black, it’s a black holiday,’ and I say, no, it’s not, it’s a people’s holiday, let’s get this straight,” says Hart, a former bull rider and rodeo clown who wants to become a motivational speaker for students.

For a while, Hart didn’t know whether he’d be able to make the trip to Washington. He has a limited income, he says, and pleas for financial assistance to the governor’s office and to his Yankton Sioux tribe were turned down.

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Then Lynn and Sherri Fischer offered to pay for Hart’s last-minute plane ticket.

“I think it was really very important that he go to Washington and represent the tribe as best he can, and I think he’ll do a fine job of it,” says Lynn Fischer, who lives at Wagner and farms “quite a bit of tribal ground.”

Fischer has known Hart since Hart was a teen, he says. He is familiar with Hart’s life: left on a Chancellor porch at only three or three days old, raised in a foster home until foster mother Elizabeth Ulfers died when he was 13.

Fischer doesn’t think that Hart felt like he fit in as a youngster.

“You can imagine being black and being Native, how tough he did have it,” Fischer says. “Not that they both individually don’t have it tough, they do, but he was never black and he was never Native.”

Hart himself acknowledges that at one point in his life he had to “learn how to be black because I had been raised white.” He wandered for a while after he left the Marine Corps in 1983 and has four children with three different mothers.

“Personally, I love South Dakota; but I’m not perfect, I’ve done a lot of crazy things,” Hart says.

That’s in the past, he says. Hart’s focus now is on improving racial harmony.

Steve Klein, spokesman for The King Center in Atlanta, describes Hart as “a great humanitarian leader for all kids, doing everything he can to help kids recognize their full potential.”

At least 200,000 people are expected for today’s march, Klein says, with participation from every state.

In addition, nationwide, at least 75 cities and 80 other locations will ring bells at 2 p.m. CDT to mark the “I Have a Dream” speech. That includes the Crazy Horse Monument in western South Dakota, he says.

Hart estimates it is about 10 years since he last heard the full “I Have a Dream” speech. Picking a memorable excerpt is as difficult as asking him to pick a favorite child or Bible verse, he says.

“Wisdom to me is what that speech is. It touches your heart, and it touches your body, and it touches your spirit,” Hart says. “I’m still trying to digest it because you live that speech, really.”